4 ms·

Well, if you want to take the traditionally Marxist position, all that competition results in duplicate work. During the golden age of the workstation, Sun, Sil

Well, if you want to take the traditionally Marxist position, all that competition results in duplicate work. During the golden age of the workstation, Sun, Silicon Graphics, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM all made workstations with separate, incompatible operating systems and CPUs. In the end, all those vendors died, and that effort was entirely wasted. It would have been much more efficient if the government had designated a single workstation vendor from the beginning, and denied CPU purchasing licenses to anyone who wanted to compete with them.

7thaccount 4y ago
Efficient? Maybe. But without competition of any kind, there's a possibility we'd still be using DOS lol. There can still be advancements of course under such a system, but I figure the progress would be a lot slower. On the flip side, I can almost see part of your argument. The weather is a perfect example of your argument. The US government funds all the weather models out there, but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather. Instead we get like 5 crappy ad-infested sites that are terrible to use and just make a few people rich. It's insane.
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  >but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather. Really? Because weather.gov has showing forecasts since 1995. You can view SF here: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=37.78&textField2=-122.42 https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=37.78&t...
  - 7thaccount 4y ago
    There is some law that prevents the radar piece. I need to see if I can find that.
andrewjl 4y ago
> It would have been much more efficient if the government had designated a single workstation vendor from the beginning, and denied CPU purchasing licenses to anyone who wanted to compete with them. How would it be more efficient without a way to know if the end result is any good?
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  You have hit on one of the core problems of a Marxist-Leninist command economy.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrewjl 4y ago
    As well as of an oligopoly-dominated economy.

7thaccount 4y ago

Efficient? Maybe. But without competition of any kind, there's a possibility we'd still be using DOS lol. There can still be advancements of course under such a system, but I figure the progress would be a lot slower. On the flip side, I can almost see part of your argument. The weather is a perfect example of your argument. The US government funds all the weather models out there, but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather. Instead we get like 5 crappy ad-infested sites that are terrible to use and just make a few people rich. It's insane.

sbierwagen 4y ago
>but due to lobbying, they're not allowed to actually have a website that tells us the weather. Really? Because weather.gov has showing forecasts since 1995. You can view SF here: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=37.78&textField2=-122.42 https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=37.78&t...
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  There is some law that prevents the radar piece. I need to see if I can find that.

andrewjl 4y ago

> It would have been much more efficient if the government had designated a single workstation vendor from the beginning, and denied CPU purchasing licenses to anyone who wanted to compete with them. How would it be more efficient without a way to know if the end result is any good?

sbierwagen 4y ago
You have hit on one of the core problems of a Marxist-Leninist command economy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewjl 4y ago
  As well as of an oligopoly-dominated economy.